English

Evaluating the Strength of Genomic Privacy Metrics

Cryptography and Security 2017-01-12 v1 Performance

Abstract

The genome is a unique identifier for human individuals. The genome also contains highly sensitive information, creating a high potential for misuse of genomic data (for example, genetic discrimination). In this paper, I investigated how genomic privacy can be measured in scenarios where an adversary aims to infer a person's genomic markers by constructing probability distributions on the values of genetic variations. I measured the strength of privacy metrics by requiring that metrics are monotonic with increasing adversary strength and uncovered serious problems with several existing metrics currently used to measure genomic privacy. I provide suggestions on metric selection, interpretation, and visualization, and illustrate the work flow using a case study on Alzheimer's disease.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.05840,
  title  = {Evaluating the Strength of Genomic Privacy Metrics},
  author = {Isabel Wagner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.05840},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

27 pages, submitted to ACM Transaction on Privacy and Security